IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 86

Feature
think and what people do, and the machines can do
that autonomously...social-media apps plumb one
of our deepest wells of motivation " [30], [31].
The dissipative mental, physical, and social consequences
of Fogg's persuasive design technology are
given further weight by Brett Frischmann and Evan
Selinger in their book, Re-Engineering Humanity who
claim " [they're] not interested in the engineering of
intelligent machines; [they're] interested in the engineering
of unintelligent humans " [32, p. 12]. According
to Frischmann and Selinger, " we're being sold a
misleading vision of cyberservants and digital assistants.
These tools don't just do our bidding. They're
also smart enough to get us to do theirs...We are being
conditioned to obey. More precisely, we're being
conditioned to want to obey. " As one commenter, C.
V. Danes, wrote on the New York Times article, " QR
codes are here to stay. So is the tracking they allow, "
" I don't think even George Orwell was cynical enough
to foresee how readily people would embrace the surveillance
society " [32, pp. 4-6], [33]-[35].
Intelligence as a dissipative structure
The term " dissipative structure " was seeded in the
early 1920s by U.S. mathematician, physical chemist,
and statistician, Alfred J. Lotka. It became most closely
linked to Nobel Prize winning physical chemist, Ilya
Prigogine, and his colleagues at the Brussels School.
According to Prigogine, dissipative structures can grow
increasingly complex over time by exporting dissipating
entropy. Concentrating organization in a system,
say, a living organism, or an ecosystem, or AI, shrinks
entropy in that system. By allowing ordered, powerful,
structured energy to concentrate one place, while displacing
spread-out, dissipated-energy someplace else,
the second law more effectively, more efficiently, produces
what it wants, more entropy, faster.8 As " A delicate
balance: technics, culture, and consequences, "
IEEE conference contributor, Rod Swenson, put it:
[If] ordered flow produces entropy faster than
disordered flow...and if the world acts to minimize
potentials at the fastest rate given the constraints...then
the world can be expected to
produce order whenever it gets the chance...The
world, in short, is in the order production business
8According to Quanta Magazine senior writer and editor, Natalie Wolchover,
physicist, Jeremy England, " explains why [living things] tend to be much better at
capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat...
This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key
physical attribute associated with life " [39]. England calls his theory " dissipative
adaptation, " a good downstream characterization of social media.
because ordered flow [as intelligence] produces
entropy faster than disordered flow [36]-[38].
The way this happens can be seen on the level of
physical and chemical phenomena, including house
demolishing tornadoes, community demolishing hurricanes,
the Bénard Cell phenomenon,9 autocatalytic
chemical reactions like the Belousov-Zhabotinski
(BZ) color flipping chemical clock, lasers, even the
tornado in a bottle demo [42]. It can also be seen in
the frame of evolving intelligence as Wissner-Gross
defined it. The maximizing of future freedom of
action powers technical advance as a dissipative
structure that more and more effectively concentrates
organized matter and energy into the " accelerating
returns " of technology as inventor, futurist, and currently
a director of engineering at Google, Kurzweil
calls it, with outlier smart human help for now [43].
Erik Verlinde's tie-in of gravity to information coupled
to its maximizing of entropy carries on as the
continued evolution of Wissner-Gross's characterization
of intelligence as evolving life on earth and
its molding of the biosphere to more effectively suit
its accelerating needs-the so-called " Gaia " hypothesis.
It continues to climb the power ladder, faster
and faster, in proto-human and human history and
its conceptual commandeering of disordered order
onto evolving self-similar freedom of action tributaries
enabled by upright walking, the sharpened edge
stone, the spear, the harnessing of fire coupled to the
draw of aroma and flavor of cooked food [44], the
evolution of language, the freeing up of ever more
specialized niches, military and civilian, thanks to the
agricultural revolution, the Renaissance, science, the
industrial revolution, on up the near vertical rising
exponential of human initiated AI; in this multi-billion-year
trajectory, the self-similar umbrella pattern
of the second law is at work organizing the more and
more efficient, ordered flow production of entropy
throughout the sweep of evolving intelligence.
Modus operandi
Realize it or not, gradients-differences that can
make a difference-are what we are. As an algorithm
for the creation of power churning order, technology
can be viewed in the frame of gradients. With respect
9In his conference paper, " Engineering initial conditions in a self-producing
environment, " Swenson includes a figure highlighting the sharp increase in the
efficiency of entropy production that occurs as the result of the sudden incoherent to
coherent heat transfer in the self-organization of ten billion trillion (1022) molecules
of swirling liquid in the form of Bénard cells. Since Bénard cells disappear as soon
as the heat is removed, the intelligence embedded in the second law has come up
with a more sustainable means of maximizing entropy: Life[40], [41].
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